M3U Playlists won't load, specific instructions for path

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Short version: working now!!!

Medium version:

  1. Place your playlist files in the same directory as the Storage Location defined in Roon. In my case this is my /Volumes/Music/Working folder.

  2. Each song defines the path relative to that location. Do not put any leading slashes or drives on there. In my case, the next level directories are Ripped, iTunes, and HDTracks. So, my entries will all begin with “Ripped/”, “iTunes/”, or “HDTracks/”.

  3. Use forward slashes in your paths. I didn’t try backslashes to see if they work too. For me, this looks like this: “Ripped/ABBA/The Singles - CD 1/01 Ring Ring.flac”

Long version:

I’m trying to edit the playlists created in iTunes to work with the songs I have imported into Roon. On iTunes, I used down-sampled versions of my ripped files and hires files from HDTracks. I don’t want to play those in Roon. I want the glory of full resolution. But I created my iTunes playlists from the same folder structures, just .mp3 files instead of .flac files.

I’m a programmer, so I use SlickEdit to edit these files. It provides powerful substitutions and scripting to automate the process. I’m just struggling to know what to put in the file.

As we can see from the above screenshots, the root of my library in Roon is \qnapnas\music\Working. Not shown in that picture: I have subdirectories for “Ripped”, “iTunes”, and “HDTracks”; which I use to keep the origins of my music separate. It really helps with the file management.

I placed my “Test_Playlist.m3u” in the \qnapnas\music\Working subdirectory. So, I believe I have placed the playlist file in the same folder as the Roon watched folder, as you say.

You say that I should use relative paths from that folder. For the example song I’m using to try to get this to work, that would be:
Ripped/ABBA/The Singles - CD 1/01 Ring Ring.flac

So my file contains the following 3 lines:

#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:185,Ring Ring - ABBA
Ripped/ABBA/The Singles - CD 1/01 Ring Ring.flac

After doing a “Force Rescan” to make sure the file is examined.

…and it works!! Awesome!!! I must not have tried this without a leading slash or without a fully qualified path.

If you could add this to the page that documents how to import playlists, that would be great. Thank you so much for your help with this! I totally love Roon, and I’m so pleased to be able to set up my playlists.

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